Open Source Governance: The Hard Parts

Presented by:

Nell Shamrell-Harrington is a Principal Software Engineer at Chef and core maintainer of the Habitat Open Source project. She is also CTO of Operation Code - a non-profit dedicated to teaching software engineer skills to Veterans that heavily creates and uses open source. Additionally, she has been a technology volunteer for multiple political campaigns. She specializes in Chef, Ruby, Rails, Rust, DevOps, and Regular Expressions and has traveled the world speaking on these topics. Prior to entering the world of software development, she studied and worked in the field of Theatre. The world of theatre prepared her well for the dynamic world of creating software applications - especially in the Open Source world. In both Theatre and Software Development she strives to create a cohesive and extraordinary experience. In her free time she enjoys practicing the martial art Naginata.

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So you’ve released an open source project to the world, people are using it …the hard part is done, right? No, far from it. Open sourcing a project is only a fraction of the effort that will go into it over time. Come to this talk to learn about the hard parts of Open Source Governance and lessons learned from using, contributing, and governing dozens of Open Source projects. Learn how to triage and determine levels of support for issues that come into your projects (open source users are customers!). Also, learn how to handle when something goes wrong – whether it is with your own project or an upstream project two levels up from yours. Want to turn users of your project into contributors? Come hear about best practices both for finding initial contributors and keeping them engaged. Walk away knowing how to handle the hardest (and most rewarding) parts of open source governance.